Provisioning Revamp

ZOS_GinaBruno

We’re considering a significant revamp of Provisioning, and we’d like to get your feedback on it. Our goals with this proposed change are to improve the experience of collecting ingredients, to get away from the idea of tiered components, and to make brewing more useful. In a nutshell, we want to allow you to utilize every basic foodstuff you see in the game with cooking.

Ingredients

• Cooking: What You See Is What You Get
  • You see grapes, you get grapes. You see cheese, you get cheese. No more clicking on a sack of green beans and getting aged meat.
• Brewing: Based on container type (barrels, sacks, and crates)
  • Brewing ingredients will be broken up by closed container type to keep them useful and to avoid overlap with cooking.

Functionality

• Food and drink categories will have clearer usage
  • Cooking: Meat = health, fruit = magicka, vegetables = stamina
  • Brewing: Alcohol = health, tea = magicka, tonic = stamina
• Combination recipes will be rarer, require more ingredients, and give multiple benefits as expected
  • Example: Rabbit (meat) and carrots (vegetable) may be combined if you have the Rabbit Stew recipe, and the result provides both a health and stamina pool increase (somewhat less than what a pure health or pure stamina food would provide, as in the current system).
• The regeneration benefit of drinking will now stack with food benefits (some balancing changes may occur)

By having ingredients sourced in clear ways and using combinations of food items instead of tiers of ingredients, we will be able to cut the number of ingredients in half while still providing just as many recipes as we have now (if not more). This will require most, if not all, of the existing recipes to be changed to accommodate this new paradigm.

Our current plan is to replace existing recipes and Provisioning items with the ones from the new system, matching quality as much as possible. Any additional unused basic ingredients from the previous incarnation of the system will be changed to “stale” versions of themselves, and we’d like to include some way to offload them that provides value.

We realize this is a major change and that many of you have invested heavily in leveling up Provisioning and collecting recipes, so we wanted to get your feedback before proceeding. We feel this would be a major improvement to the game and want to hear your thoughts on the matter!

Yusuf

This sounds like a huge undertaking but i like those ideas

Tarukmockto

This all sounds pretty great! I have one comment and one question.

The question first: How will the food & drink increase to match the levels of the player? Will it be certain meats/vegetables/fruits/grains make level appropriate foods & drinks? Wouldn't this go against the non-tier concept?

Now the comment: Wouldn't it make more sense for Alcohol to make Magicka, and for Tea to make Health? I'm just sayin', Alcohol can seem magical! lol

Darzil

Allowing Food and Drink to stack is very positive, otherwise one or other will pretty much always been seen as preferred (currently Food by miles).

The transition is pretty important, as recipe collection is the difficult part of provisioning, so the recipes should be carefully converted to others that give the same attributes. Often people will have paid a lot of gold for them. It does make sense to have lesser yields on things that effect multiple attributes, but the exact numbers will be interesting to see.

The biggest issues with the current system are less about the ingredients, though the sheer number of them combined with the very limited inventory space in the game is an issue, but are around veteran levels not dropping the right level of ingredients (partially addressed recently), lower level ingredients not dropping (introduced recently, as ingredients dropped seems to be based on character level not zone, at least once veteran), and recipes being very rare (I think I've seen one blue recipe and no purples (and one motif) in 3 veteran zones, opening everything I encounter). A tweak to rarities coupled with making ingredient drops based on zone rather than character level, and fixing all the ingredient types, would be appreciated.

eventide03b14a_ESO

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

We’re considering a significant revamp of Provisioning, and we’d like to get your feedback on it. Our goals with this proposed change are to improve the experience of collecting ingredients, to get away from the idea of tiered components, and to make brewing more useful. In a nutshell, we want to allow you to utilize every basic foodstuff you see in the game with cooking.

Ingredients

• Cooking: What You See Is What You Get
  • You see grapes, you get grapes. You see cheese, you get cheese. No more clicking on a sack of green beans and getting aged meat.
• Brewing: Based on container type (barrels, sacks, and crates)
  • Brewing ingredients will be broken up by closed container type to keep them useful and to avoid overlap with cooking.

Functionality

• Food and drink categories will have clearer usage
  • Cooking: Meat = health, fruit = magicka, vegetables = stamina
  • Brewing: Alcohol = health, tea = magicka, tonic = stamina
• Combination recipes will be rarer, require more ingredients, and give multiple benefits as expected
  • Example: Rabbit (meat) and carrots (vegetable) may be combined if you have the Rabbit Stew recipe, and the result provides both a health and stamina pool increase (somewhat less than what a pure health or pure stamina food would provide, as in the current system).
• The regeneration benefit of drinking will now stack with food benefits (some balancing changes may occur)

By having ingredients sourced in clear ways and using combinations of food items instead of tiers of ingredients, we will be able to cut the number of ingredients in half while still providing just as many recipes as we have now (if not more). This will require most, if not all, of the existing recipes to be changed to accommodate this new paradigm.

Our current plan is to replace existing recipes and Provisioning items with the ones from the new system, matching quality as much as possible. Any additional unused basic ingredients from the previous incarnation of the system will be changed to “stale” versions of themselves, and we’d like to include some way to offload them that provides value.

We realize this is a major change and that many of you have invested heavily in leveling up Provisioning and collecting recipes, so we wanted to get your feedback before proceeding. We feel this would be a major improvement to the game and want to hear your thoughts on the matter!

Perfect! This is right in line with my wish list for provisioning changes.

Garbrac

Shameless Plug is Shameless

But they discuss the new Provisioning changes on the Podcast we did last week. By they I mean Philip Draven from Zenimax
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPhcbELh5Cg

Mujuro

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

We realize this is a major change and that many of you have invested heavily in leveling up Provisioning and collecting recipes, so we wanted to get your feedback before proceeding. We feel this would be a major improvement to the game and want to hear your thoughts on the matter!

What would happen with our current provisioning progress? Most everyone I know is at 50 provisioning with most of the current recipes known (missing only the purples, which appear to be ultra-rare and sell for more than most people's first-born children), and passives in the core elements plus food (no one I know takes the drink passives because, well, as you've surmised, drinks have been vastly inferior).

CaptainSilverbrow

Allowing the two food item types to be applicably miscible is certainly a match that seems meant to be; being a mercantilist (hey, hirelings are almost as good as colonies) myself, I can't help but feel this risks throttling variety and Provisioning mat' diversity, affecting the market likewise. Another idea, why not apply other benefits to beverages in particular, like weapon damage/penetration, spell damage/penetration, armor, so on and so forth? It'd feel less like we have a pool of only two items from which to choose for our preferred benefits. I might share a more detailed post on the idea in the PTR forums, but it sounds like it'd work swimmingly with what's been described here, in the OP. It would also make for more valuable recipes, too.

StihlReign

The regeneration benefit of drinking will now stack with food benefits (some balancing changes may occur)

Winner!

joeparadis_ESO

I have some feedback:

1) I really like the idea of cutting down the amount of provisioning ingredients and placing them in proper containers as well as the re-organization of those materials.

2) How will looting these items change when we move to the justice system? Will we be stealing these items out of vendor stalls and from all the containers on the docks in Vulkel guard? or will it be free looting per usual?

3) how will this effect dungeons? One thing that always bothered me was delving into a dungeon previously unexplored for hundreds of years but finding fresh wheat malt and grapes lying around inside lol.

4) I DON'T like the idea of nerfing recipe drops. It's hard as hell to find combo recipes as it is. Especially epic recipes. I've been playing the game since prelaunch and I've only found a single purple recipe while playing 8 toons.

The people that are finding these recipes in bulk are professional players of the game who are constantly online farming mats, chests, dungeons etc. Please don't Nerf it for the rest of us more casual players. Also regarding epic recipes one of the things that makes them Less "Epic" is the fact that their buff values are nerfed.

I'd rather see a fourth legendary tier recipe bracket which requires more ingredients than even epic meals and will give the player non-nerfed buffs for 2 hrs.

SirAndy

I like those changes.

My suggestion regarding the value:
Simply make those "stale" items worth 1g each

In fact, make all junk items worth 1g each. That way they're not complete junk.
Right now, all i ever do with them is "destroy". I gets old after a while.

1g per junk item is not going to destroy the economy. If some farmer bot really wants to collect 100,000 junk world objects, so be it.
But don't let that pressure you into making the crafting part of this game a chore for the rest of us.
;-)

redspecter23

I find it a bit confusing that combination recipes are proposed to be more rare than they are currently. Purple recipes are currently the most valuable items in the game, with a Consummate Honey Brittle recipe able to reasonably sell for 1 million gold. Even the level 35 purples are 10k at bare minimum, going up to 50k or more. You want them to be "more rare"?

With that out of the way, the rest of the changes seem positive. As long as my current collection isn't blown away completely and what I've put into it so far is retained in some way, I'll be happy. Consolidation of mats seems like a good change.

I'm not sure what's new about combination recipes providing multiple benefits at a lower rate. That's how it is now.

While you're tinkering with recipes, be sure to fix the following problems.

Daggerfall Covenant blue horker recipes do not appear to be dropping currently. I have seen blue AD and EP food recipes drop where DC should and I've heard reports that the horker blue recipes drop in AD instead.

The "Invigorated Grilled Horker" recipe is mislabeled and drops in the wrong zone. It should be Invigorated Crawdad Etoufee and should drop in AD and not DC (where it currently drops). A recipe with the name Invigorated Crawdad Etoufee does not appear to be dropping currently.

Green Saltrice Slurry seems to be missing from the loot tables.

V5 and level 50 purple drinks provide the exact same bonus. Doesn't seem quite right.

Post the "cooldown" timer that is currently used on looting recipes. My anecdotal testing puts this timer at about 10 minutes, but an official statement would be welcome. I'm assuming the cooldown timer is intended and not a bug. The actual drop rate on recipes (in general) seems to be quite high (15% - 20% by my estimation) but the loot cooldown makes them feel much more rare to players who don't know about it, which is most of them.

This one is more of an opinion, but please reconsider your proposal of making purple recipes more rare. I find something rather sad about the fact that the most valuable item in the game by a factor of 20 or more is a rare recipe from a container.

Oberon

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Our current plan is to replace existing recipes and Provisioning items with the ones from the new system, matching quality as much as possible. Any additional unused basic ingredients from the previous incarnation of the system will be changed to “stale” versions of themselves, and we’d like to include some way to offload them that provides value.

I suggest that nothing go "stale".

If there are items that exist now but will not exist under the new system, simply convert them to something in the new system. It doesn't really matter what they are converted to--pick one of the new items that even remotely resembles its value and change it to that.

This avoids players simply losing value for nothing, and eliminates the need for ZOS to come up with some arbitrary way to provide value for those items.

If this results in the same item appearing twice or more in my inventory, that's no different than it is now. If I want to stack them up (say I have stacks of 53 and 79 and 21 of the same item after the conversion is done) then I simply drop them into my bank and pull them out again to restack. No fuss, no muss. Simple.

timidobserver

Questions:

1. Will there still be ingredients that can only be delivered by the hireling like Oats.
2. Will there be V12 recipes or yellow recipes?
3. How will drop rates change with regard to rare recipes?

@ZOS_GinaBruno

eventide03b14a_ESO

@Garbrac‌ I was watching the podcast and someone suggested that fishing should be tied into the dye system. I really hope that they don't implement that. I hate fishing in real life. I hated it in the Sims, I hated it in EQ2. Fishing is not fun. There is nothing you can do to make it fun if you don't like standing there literally doing nothing for a period of time. Please do not force me to fish just so that I can have armor dye. I know you want to make fishing relevant ZOS, but please don't make us do something dull just to justify something that you implemented. I'm sure there is a niche for people that enjoy fishing but please keep it optional.

SG_Celerrimus

I like the idea, it sounds interesting, so I say throw it up on the PTS and see how it plays.

SirAndy

joeparadis_ESO wrote: »

One thing that always bothered me was delving into a dungeon previously unexplored for hundreds of years but finding fresh wheat malt and grapes lying around inside lol.

@joeparadis_ESO
What always bothers me is that people expect realism in some of the oddest places while playing a fantasy game.

Your have walking lizards and talking cats and flying ghost dinosaur pets and you shoot fireballs out of a wooden stick and you can carry 100 swords and drink a potion that can heal you in a second and wear a hat that can knock back an opponent, yet you are bothered to find a bundle of grapes in a dungeon?

stewie_801

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Ingredients

• Cooking: What You See Is What You Get
  • You see grapes, you get grapes. You see cheese, you get cheese. No more clicking on a sack of green beans and getting aged meat.
• Brewing: Based on container type (barrels, sacks, and crates)
  • Brewing ingredients will be broken up by closed container type to keep them useful and to avoid overlap with cooking.

I really like this, and think it makes a whole lot of sense to do. It was always annoying seeing a basket of tomatoes, apples, or green beans and getting meat instead. All for the change.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Functionality

• Food and drink categories will have clearer usage
  • Cooking: Meat = health, fruit = magicka, vegetables = stamina
  • Brewing: Alcohol = health, tea = magicka, tonic = stamina
• Combination recipes will be rarer, require more ingredients, and give multiple benefits as expected
  • Example: Rabbit (meat) and carrots (vegetable) may be combined if you have the Rabbit Stew recipe, and the result provides both a health and stamina pool increase (somewhat less than what a pure health or pure stamina food would provide, as in the current system).
• The regeneration benefit of drinking will now stack with food benefits (some balancing changes may occur)

Like others have said, not sure I like that combo recipes being more rare. I have all the v5 blue recipes but have yet to get the v5 consummate purple recipes. Although from everyone my friend and I have talked to who had those recipes, they all said they got them from trials. If thats true for being the only drop spot, I understand it from the perspective of trying to stop the gold/item farmers that sell them online. But at the same time, I don't really want them only to be available in the 12 man content because I don't want to run those that much. It would be nice if they would still drop in the 4man vet dungeons to. Maybe they do already, just haven't seen or heard of them dropping there yet. So really making them more rare, I would be more ok with if they were still available outside trials. If they are indeed only available there, then I don't really want them to make the recipes even rarer.

I do love the idea of drinking stacking with food. That I think makes all those drink recipes and ingredients actually useful, as I don't know anyone who would take drink over food right now in its current form.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

By having ingredients sourced in clear ways and using combinations of food items instead of tiers of ingredients, we will be able to cut the number of ingredients in half while still providing just as many recipes as we have now (if not more). This will require most, if not all, of the existing recipes to be changed to accommodate this new paradigm.

Our current plan is to replace existing recipes and Provisioning items with the ones from the new system, matching quality as much as possible. Any additional unused basic ingredients from the previous incarnation of the system will be changed to “stale” versions of themselves, and we’d like to include some way to offload them that provides value.

We realize this is a major change and that many of you have invested heavily in leveling up Provisioning and collecting recipes, so we wanted to get your feedback before proceeding. We feel this would be a major improvement to the game and want to hear your thoughts on the matter!

I would love for the less ingredients. I have two toons at level 50 provisioning so being able free up some bank space would be nice. With changing recipes, I hope the ones we already have learned would get changed and allows us to still know the new recipe without having to find it. If it were just taking out the recipe and replacing it, then have to go find the new recipes, I think that would suck and hurt all those who are already have level 50 and a bunch of recipes.

Anath_Q

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Ingredients

• Cooking: What You See Is What You Get
  • You see grapes, you get grapes. You see cheese, you get cheese. No more clicking on a sack of green beans and getting aged meat.
• Brewing: Based on container type (barrels, sacks, and crates)
  • Brewing ingredients will be broken up by closed container type to keep them useful and to avoid overlap with cooking.

This is great...depending on what we need to cook, this cuts down on the number of containers we need to watch for and loot.

Functionality

• Food and drink categories will have clearer usage
  • Cooking: Meat = health, fruit = magicka, vegetables = stamina
  • Brewing: Alcohol = health, tea = magicka, tonic = stamina
• Combination recipes will be rarer, require more ingredients, and give multiple benefits as expected
  • Example: Rabbit (meat) and carrots (vegetable) may be combined if you have the Rabbit Stew recipe, and the result provides both a health and stamina pool increase (somewhat less than what a pure health or pure stamina food would provide, as in the current system).
• The regeneration benefit of drinking will now stack with food benefits (some balancing changes may occur) FINALLY!! YES!!

By having ingredients sourced in clear ways and using combinations of food items instead of tiers of ingredients, we will be able to cut the number of ingredients in half while still providing just as many recipes as we have now (if not more). This will require most, if not all, of the existing recipes to be changed to accommodate this new paradigm.

Love the plan to reduce the sheer number of ingredients, not as thrilled about the idea of making higher quality recipes even harder to find than they already are.

I hate the idea of dropped recipes anyway...I would much rather see provisioning quests to unlock recipes. This would keep provisioning fresh (since we hit 50 so fast) and make it seem a bit more immersive. Having to help a NPC Chef perfect a new recipe via a mini questline, and then having that new recipe as part of our own cookbook...very fun. Getting a quality recipe off a random mudcab kill? Very funny, but...meh.

Our current plan is to replace existing recipes and Provisioning items with the ones from the new system, matching quality as much as possible. Any additional unused basic ingredients from the previous incarnation of the system will be changed to “stale” versions of themselves, and we’d like to include some way to offload them that provides value.

How about an exchange merchant...a merchant interested in buying the old stuff - that just happens to be in high demand in Morrowind - for an amount of gold that scales with the outdated ingredient's rarity level?

Garbrac

eventide03b14a_ESO wrote: »

@Garbrac‌ I was watching the podcast and someone suggested that fishing should be tied into the dye system. I really hope that they don't implement that. I hate fishing in real life. I hated it in the Sims, I hated it in EQ2. Fishing is not fun. There is nothing you can do to make it fun if you don't like standing there literally doing nothing for a period of time. Please do not force me to fish just so that I can have armor dye. I know you want to make fishing relevant ZOS, but please don't make us do something dull just to justify something that you implemented. I'm sure there is a niche for people that enjoy fishing but please keep it optional.

You're not going to be very happy. There is a lot of colours tied to completely fishing achievements....

Nicky_W

This doesn't bode well for my 900 strong supply of Fortified Sweetroll

purple-magicb16_ESO

[

Tarukmockto wrote: »

This all sounds pretty great! I have one comment and one question.

The question first: How will the food & drink increase to match the levels of the player? Will it be certain meats/vegetables/fruits/grains make level appropriate foods & drinks?

Probably simply by using the crafter's level as a multiplier when determining benefits & level of provision.

Anath_Q

phunkeymonkehb16_ESO wrote: »

This doesn't bode well for my 900 strong supply of Fortified Sweetroll

Depending on when any of this gets implemented, you may have eaten all of them.

That said, food and drink that already exists when this goes live could simply be left alone, allowing players to burn off the old before switching to the new.

purple-magicb16_ESO

phunkeymonkehb16_ESO wrote: »

This doesn't bode well for my 900 strong supply of Fortified Sweetroll

Let me guess, somebody stole your sweetroll?

Nicky_W

purple-magicb16_ESO wrote: »

phunkeymonkehb16_ESO wrote: »

This doesn't bode well for my 900 strong supply of Fortified Sweetroll

Let me guess, somebody stole your sweetroll?

It's a habit I can't stop.
I find some red wheat, some honey comb..and something takes control of me.
I have to make my sweetrolls.
I need help.

Sharee

So my purple recipes will no longer be useful...

Ah what the heck, go ahead, i got them once, i'll get them again

Catches_the_Sun

I'll let the rest of this soak in & give a more detailed response, but immediately my first concern is this...I just got the best recipe in the game, the Consummate Honey Brittle, which took me days of playtime and a great amount of luck to finally find, and now I am going to lose it?

Maverick827

@ZOS_GinaBruno‌

First of all, thank you for making this thread. Provisioning is probably the number one thing that frustrates me in this game, so I'm glad o see that it's being worked on.

Others have already commented on your words, "Combination recipes will be rarer," but can you please clarify exactly what you meant by this? I see two possible meanings. The recipes could be rarer than they are currently, or they could be rarer than the non-combination recipes. If it's the latter, then I think that's pretty obvious and no one should have any complaints. If it's the former, then I would sadly have to say that fact alone would make this entire revamp for naught, at least for me.

I'm at a place where I have advanced as far as I can with the profession except for the nearly non-existant epic recipes, which have proven extremely frustrating to find. If this change is promising to remove my recipes and force me to acquire new green and blue recipes, without the benefit of having an easier/more fun means of acquiring the purple ones, then I'll only be losing things from the change. I don't think that is the intention of this revamp.

To boil (no pun intended) my wants down to a list of what I'd like to see most from provisioning,

1. A fairer and more fun way of acquiring rare recipes. Relog farming containers is getting extremely old.
2. A consolidation of ingredients and/or a better labeling of ingredients to show which are used for what level of recipes.
3. A more refined method of finding ingredients, which you've already said you're working on.

Ideally for #1 I'd like a possible sense of inevitability for obtaining recipes, as the dozens (hundreds?) of hours I have put into trying to obtain epic recipes in the current system has left a sour taste in my mouth (no pun intended again). No other profession relies on such rare and expensive drops to reach its maximum potential, why should provisioning?

I'm not exactly sure how this can be achieved yet, but my initial idea would be through a quest line in which the player seeks out legendary chef (a la The Gourmet) who agrees to train/share his epic (purple) recipes if they player can prove himself or herself in some way. Perhaps by providing one sample of each of the rare (blue) recipes? Like most things in my life, I take this cue from the show Futurama, specifically the episode "The Iron Chef."

Sasky

The details for combo recipes are a bit vague. The might just be reducing the drop rate of the blue equivalent and not the purple.

Food + Drink is a welcome change. It was a bit odd how everything on the crafting side was separated food and drink but not on the consumption side.

Are the recipes and items still going to be alliance-specific?

One thing that could make combo recipes more interesting to use would be to make them cross faction ingredients.

Soliss

This sounds like a lot of work and text for virtually no little discernable change at all.

The only thing that sticks out is being able to use food + drink at the same time.

If you want to revamp provisioning, put in more endgame recipes that have more effects than just health, stamina, magicka.

"Never mistake activity for achievement"

alenae1b14_ESO

A big step in the right direction. Less ingredients would free up some inventory space. Having drink and food stack, excellent. Purple combo recipes... I want level appropriate food. I have one purple recipe lvl 35 and I am VR9 and it's not for lack of clicking and scrounging. They are just too rare.